“Ole found this huge vein of gold, and we then figured out a way to mine the gold,” Ono said of the discovery. “We went to work and showed how to come full circle and make use of the formulas. Now we can extract infinitely any functions whose values are these beautiful algebraic numbers.”

In the people’s choice awards, the math discovery is vying against stories of cosmic inflation, cybersecurity leaks, the collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet, the battle against the Ebola outbreak, the genomes of the first Americans, entangled photons and the Rosetta spacecraft’s rendezvous with a comet. It was another big year for science news, showcasing a wide range of disciplines. In fact, one of the only things all of these science advances have in common is their reliance on math.